King, Jonas, 1792-1869

Jonas King (1792-1869) was born near Hawley, Mass., the son of strict Puritan parents. He graduated from Williams College in 1816 and Andover Theological Seminary in 1819, and then spent six months at a mission in Charleston, S.C., where he was ordained as an evangelist. In the early 1820s, King studied Arabic under De Sacy in Paris where he apparently became involved with Sampson Vryling Stoddard Wilder (1780-1865) and the Paris Missionary Society. Following three years of missionary work in Palestine, King proceeded to Greece where he married Annetta Aspasia Mengous in 1829. He remained in Greece as a missionary and published many theological works in Greek. Because of his Puritan background and his staunch evangelical ardor, King aroused a great deal of opposition from the Greek Orthodox Church. In 1852, he was convicted of reviling the Greek church, a charge from which he was later vindicated. In 1869 King died in Athens.

King was a missionary of the American Board of Commisioners for Foreign Missions.